Revolution in Agriculture

Despite the great gains in industry, agriculture remained
the nation's basic occupation. The revolution in
agriculture -- paralleling that in manufacturing after the
Civil War -- involved a shift from hand labor to machine
farming, and from subsistence to commercial agriculture.
Between 1860 and 1910, the number of farms in the United
States tripled, increasing from two million to six million,
while the area farmed more than doubled from 160 million to
352 million hectares.

Between 1860 and 1890, the production of such basic
commodities as wheat, corn, and cotton outstripped all
previous figures in the United States. In the same period,
the nation's population more than doubled, with the largest
growth in the cities. But the American farmer grew enough
grain and cotton, raised enough beef and pork, and clipped
enough wool not only to supply American workers and their
families but also to create ever-increasing surpluses.

Several factors accounted for this extraordinary
achievement. One was the expansion into the West. Another
was a technological revolution. The farmer of 1800, using a
hand sickle, could hope to cut a fifth of a hectare of
wheat a day. With the cradle, 30 years later, he might cut
four-fifths. In 1840 Cyrus McCormick performed a miracle by
cutting from two to two-and-a-half hectares a day with the
reaper, a machine he had been developing for nearly 10
years. He headed west to the young prairie town of Chicago,
where he set up a factory -- and by 1860 sold a quarter of
a million reapers.

Other farm machines were developed in rapid succession: the
automatic wire binder, the threshing machine, and the
reaper-thresher or combine. Mechanical planters, cutters,
huskers, and shellers appeared, as did cream separators,
manure spreaders, potato planters, hay driers, poultry
incubators, and a hundred other inventions.

Scarcely less important than machinery in the agricultural
revolution was science. In 1862 the Morrill Land Grant
College Act allotted public land to each state for the
establishment of agricultural and industrial colleges.
These were to serve both as educational institutions and as
centers for research in scientific farming. Congress
subsequently appropriated funds for the creation of
agricultural experiment stations throughout the country and
granted funds directly to the Department of Agriculture for
research purposes. By the beginning of the new century,
scientists throughout the United States were at work on a
wide variety of agricultural projects.

One of these scientists, Mark Carleton, traveled for the
Department of Agriculture to Russia. There he found and
exported to his homeland the rust- and drought-resistant
winter wheat that now accounts for more than half the U.S.
wheat crop. Another scientist, Marion Dorset, conquered the
dreaded hog cholera, while still another, George Mohler,
helped prevent hoof-and-mouth disease. From North Africa,
one researcher brought back Kaffir corn; from Turkestan,
another imported the yellow flowering alfalfa. Luther
Burbank in California produced scores of new fruits and
vegetables; in Wisconsin, Stephen Babcock devised a test
for determining the butterfat content of milk; at Tuskegee
Institute in Alabama, the African-American scientist George
Washington Carver found hundreds of new uses for the
peanut, sweet potato, and soybean.

In varying degrees, the explosion in agricultural science
and technology affected farmers all over the world, raising
yields, squeezing out small producers, and driving
migration to industrial cities. Railroads and steamships,
moreover, began to pull regional markets into one large
world market with prices instantly communicated by
trans-Atlantic cable as well as ground wires. Good news for
urban consumers, falling agricultural prices threatened the
livelihood of many American farmers and touched off a wave
of agrarian discontent.